FLOAT UP, SING DOWN

Covering just one day, these closely linked stories reveal the many ties and secrets of a rural Indiana town.

It’s the early 1980s and Reagan is president. As she prepares for the monthly gathering of the Bright Creek Girls Gaming Club, Candy Wilson realizes she’s forgotten to buy paprika for her deviled eggs. Elsewhere in Bright Creek, Turner Davis is late getting his zinnias in. Horace Allen smells the sea from the mix of herbs and vegetables in his garden. Each of the 14 stories is named for a town resident, and most are told in a close third person that shares characters’ thoughts and memories, often in connection with their neighbors. The paprika and zinnias might suggest a fair helping of the mundane, but Hunt, whose novels have featured war, racism, and sorcery, has a lot going on here. As he charts how often, and amusingly, characters’ paths cross in a small town, he delves into “all those little secrets that weren’t secrets at all,” from a teacher who is fired amid rumors of lesbianism to a high school custodian who was once a “promising ballroom dancer” to a World War II veteran who found unrequited love on Crete. Hunt gets a lot of life on the page with the shrewd accumulation of details. The teacher, Irma Ray, recently hanged herself, and her real secret is a late revelation. Also appearing is Zorrie Underwood, the title character from Hunt’s novel Zorrie (2021), which furnishes a few other people in the new work. This sort of cross-pollination comes up in recent novels by Elizabeth Strout and Michael Farris Smith, both writers with a defined literary terrain, which may be something Hunt is working toward. In broader terms, his book harks back to Our Town, of which Thornton Wilder said he sought “to find a value above all price for the smallest events of our daily life.”

An entertaining work of exceptional vitality.